Timeless themes of controversy, advocacy make them much more than children’s stories

Since Sater and Sheik were the minds behind “Spring Awakening,” a Tony-Award-winning play that also featured coming-of-age-stories, we should not be surprised that they have refashioned Andersen’s work so that we now follow the maturation of the young Emperor. Buddha-like, he has grown up entirely within the castle walls of San Souci and knows nothing about the larger world of the poor outside his pleasure dome. But thanks to his infatuation with a peasant girl and a magical glowing book (which seems to resemble an iPad), he learns about that other world once he ignores his disapproving mother and leaves his castle — coming out, as it were.

In this way, this new version of “The Nightingale” joins a host of other recent offerings where the fairy tales — once seen as the exclusive property of children — have become a favored locale for adolescents and the coming-of-age story. Last year there were the films “Beastly” (a modern-day riff on “Beauty and the Beast” featuring a misunderstood and heavily tattooed high school student as the Beast) and “Red Riding Hood” (directed by Catherine Hardwicke of the vampire-driven “Twilight” franchise and aimed at the same demographic by making the story’s villain into a werewolf). Now fairy tales seem everywhere: on television (“Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time”) and in movie theaters (where the recent “Snow White and the Huntsman,” starring Charlize Theron, replaces an incarnation of the same tale from just months before, “Mirror, Mirror,” starring Julia Roberts).

In other eras, authors depended upon an audience’s wide familiarity with the Bible or Greek myths to understand their jibes and allusions and to make their points. Nowadays — when we mention a “Cinderella story” or refer to someone as an “Ugly Duckling” — it becomes clear that fairy tales are what we have in common. For this reason, too, fairy tales are good to think with.

Jerry Griswold, former director of SDSU’s National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, will participate in a talk after the Aug. 5 matinee of “The Nightingale.”